Time of the Daleks isn’t as clever or groundbreaking as it thinks it is. Having Daleks quoting Shakespeare as they trundle round and kill people probably sounded like a fantastic novelty pitch back in the day but in truth it is a gimmick which sounds as if it has been stuck on with sellotape. It manages at the same time to be both utterly superfluous and yet (sadly) the only thing of substance in the play.

The whole concept of using mirrors and clocks to travel through time was done way back in Evil of the Daleks. There it was an absurd device to enable item A to reach point B and that was about it. There was so much else going on that we can forgive the production team for giving shelf space to such a silly idea. In Time of the Daleks it is not only the centre piece of the plot but is extended to allow people to travel through TIN FOIL. Having your sandwiches wrapped up in a space-time portal is about the silliest thing Big Finish would present until discs one, two and three of Zagreus.

It also shamelessly steals the notion of watching William Shakespeare in action from The Chase. What was a bit of jokey padding back in 1965 becomes the overriding motivation of one of the central characters in the modern play. One can only wonder what it would’ve been like had the other clip from The Chase been invoked – we might’ve heard Daleks quoting from the Beatles and rebels eager to bring Yellow Submarine back to the people. Be honest – you’re already imagining a Dalek singing the "nah nah nah" bit from Hey Jude aren’t you?

You could even argue that the enmeshing of the Daleks in a complicated temporal paradox brings back memories of Day of the Daleks and The Mutant Phase. Like the other two elements mentioned, what was glossed over in the earlier stories is given centre stage here and is no more welcome than playwright voyeurism or travelling through the looking glass.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I don’t have much good to say about Time of the Daleks. It is an overly complicated, gimmick ridden and uninteresting listen which doesn’t really seem to have any scope for improvement. The only pleasing part about it is the effective foreshadowing in some of the earlier plays in the season. Orson Welles not knowing who Shakespeare was, the thing which sounded like a Dalek which appeared in Seasons of Fear actually WAS a Dalek and so on. Much better than giving significance to things retrospectively or, worse, littering stories with references so the pay-off comes as a relief because it is finally over (cough, Torchwood, cough). This may well be the only time a BF "arc" was actually effective. Subtlety can be so much more effective than sledgehammer. They then return to the Daleks trapped in time angle in Neverland which was nice to hear. It was used as an interesting moral dilemma, the resolution of which determined how morally corrupt a number of different potential futures had become.

Now for the bit where I say what would’ve made it better. It is arrogant and probably presumptuous of me but there you go. The Bible. I contend it would’ve been a better story if the Bible had been the focus rather than Shakespeare. Daleks quoting from the Bible as they trundle around killing people. Rebels willing to overthrow the government because it has, in some way, taken the Bible from them. I realise that the Bible doesn’t have a lone author (lets ignore the "who wrote Shakespeare’s plays" argument for now) but it must be possible to construct a storyline where it (or a significant part of it) can be erased from history. The only copy of the Bible would, like the complete Shakespeare in TotD, rest in the hands of a power-crazed dictator who could use it to support her twisted agenda. We already have fundamentalist Christians in America who would like nothing more than to give the Bible a heavy edit so that all that remains are the passages which support their bigoted stance. The likes of George Bush would happily make a deal with the Daleks if it meant a Good Book which was unambiguous in its condemnation of all which the Republican elite find disgusting.

Time of the Daleks is a mess. Maybe it would’ve worked in the old days of Hartnell or Troughton but now, where the "clever pseudo-science" is played up and the "whimsy" is played down, it is just a pretentious, confusing and ridiculous waste of two hours.